THE EVENING SKY AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX

Round the year with the stars by Garrett Putman Serviss is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE EVENING SKY AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX

I. THE EVENING SKY AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX

The year has its morning no less unmistakable in its characteristic features than the dawn of the day. The earth and all of its inhabitants feel the subtle influences of the dawning year, and Nature awakes at their touch. This annual morning comes when the sun transits the equator, moving north, at the beginning of his long summer tour, about the 20th of March. This is the epoch of the Vernal Equinox, when the springs of life begin, once more, to flow. Then the sun truly rises on the northern hemisphere. Then the mighty world of the north, which Providence has made the chief abode of vital organisms on this planet, rouses itself and shakes off the apathy of winter, and men, animals, and plants, each after their manner, renew their activities, and in many cases their very existence. This annual reawakening is one of the profoundest phenomena of nature, and there are secrets in it which science has not yet penetrated.

Bliss Carman has beautifully pictured the terrestrial charms of the vernal season in his “Spring’s Saraband”:

“Over the hills of April,
With soft winds hand in hand,
Impassionate and dreamy-eyed
Spring leads her saraband.
Her garments float and gather
And swirl along the plain,
Her headgear is the golden sun,
Her cloak the silver rain.”

But why do not the poets see and express the hyperphysical charm of the spring evenings? When the light of the vernal day has faded the stars come forth, and in the quality of their shining reduplicate and heighten the impressions left by the quickening landscapes. More than half is lost if this be missed. But perhaps this side of nature is too transcendent even for poetry. One can behold but not tell it. Emerson has come nearest to its expression, and he puts it in prose:

“The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of the flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn.”

CHART I—THE VERNAL EVENING SKY

There was not only poetic but logical fitness in the old English custom, abandoned since 1751, of dating the opening of the year from the last week of March. How can the real birth of the year be imagined to occur when all nature is still deep in slumber under the January snows? The seasons are manifestly the children of the sun, waxing and waning with his strength, and surely that one should be reckoned the eldest which is the first birth of his vivific springtime rays. It seems remarkable that the beginning of the year in ancient times, when men felt more keenly than we do now the symbolism of natural phenomena, was not more frequently fixed at, or near, the Vernal Equinox, and I suspect some defect in our information on this subject. In Attica, George Cornewell Lewis tells us, the year began at the Summer Solstice. But this was to make the second of the sun’s seasonal offspring the senior, thus ignoring the just claim of the true heir, the season of buds. In Sparta and Macedonia, according to the same authority, the year began with the Autumnal Equinox, which was still worse, for in summer the year is at the zenith of its life, while in autumn it is already stumbling toward the tomb. In Bœotia, at Delphi, and in Bithynia they contradicted nature more decidedly, as we do to-day, by making the year begin at the Winter Solstice, when the chilled world is yet asleep. The Romans adopted this plan eventually, but it is interesting to observe that they had an older custom of beginning the year in March, which many cherished in their domestic life as well as for some legal purposes, after the lawful opening of the year had been fixed on the 1st of January. And finally we have perpetuated the illogical system of absolutely reversing nature’s rule in the succession of the seasons by making the year begin about nine days after the Winter Solstice. But in spite of calendars and laws nature prevails, and everybody instinctively feels that the true beginning of the year is in the season when the currents of life resume their youthful flow. At any rate, however it may be with strictly terrestrial affairs, that is the time when the call of the stars becomes the most insistent and irresistible. Accordingly the epoch of the Vernal Equinox is chosen for our opening chapter. But the reader at the commencement of his star-gazing is not confined to this season; he can begin at any time convenient to him.

To avoid misapprehension it is important to point out that our concern is not with that half of the heavens which the sun illumines when he crosses the equator, coming north, at the Vernal Equinox, but with the diametrically opposite half, where in countless multitudes shine his fellow suns—his peers, his inferiors, and his superiors—turning physical night into intellectual day. Accordingly, in Chart I we see not that part of the sky which contains the point called the Vernal Equinox, but the opposite part, where the sun pursues his course when he is declining from the Summer Solstice toward the Autumnal Equinox. The chart represents the appearance of the sky at 10 p.m. on the 20th of March (see Introduction). It also represents the sky as it appears about 11.30 p.m. at the beginning of March, about 9 p.m. the first week of April, and 8 p.m. about April 20th.

Let us, then, near one of these dates and hours, go out-of-doors and transport ourselves to the universe. Why does not everybody feel the thrill that comes to the astronomer when, with eager expectation, he watches the fading sunset light, the slow withdrawal of the vast curtain of illuminated air which for twelve hours has hidden the prodigious marvel of the spangled heavens, and the first peering forth of the great stars? I believe that everybody does feel it when he gives himself the opportunity and abandons his mind to its own reflections—but so few embrace the opportunity or encourage the reflections!

Select, if possible, a high place, where the eyes can range round the whole horizon unobstructed. Then try to seize the entire view at once, as one glances for the first time at the map of a new country. Get the ensemble by sweeping all around the sky, not pausing to note details, but catching at a glance the location of the brighter stars and those that form striking groups. Note where the Milky Way runs, a faint, silvery zone at this season, arched across the western half of the firmament, hanging like starry gossamers in places, brilliant in the northwest, but becoming fainter as it dips toward the southwestern horizon—a mere anticipation of its summer splendor, hiding its light and fading away as it approaches the imperial presence of Sirius. Notice the great hexagon of first magnitude stars that surrounds Orion in the west—Sirius, Rigel, Aldebaran, Capella, Castor and Pollux, and Procyon marking the angles, and Betelgeuse glittering not far from the centre of the figure. Observe Regulus with the “Sickle” of Leo on the meridian. Look for the glimmer of the “Beehive” in Cancer, between Gemini and Leo, and for the pentangular head of Hydra beneath it. Still lower you will see the reddish gleam of the starry serpent’s heart, Cor Hydræ, or Alphard, and then, running eastward, and dipping ever nearer the horizon, the long, winding line of his stars passing under the overset cup of Crater and the quadrilateral of Corvus, the “Crow,” until they disappear, unended, in the southeast, for from mid-heaven to the horizon there is not space enough to display all of these beautiful coils, which take a kind of life as you watch them.

Away over in the east, close to the ecliptic, you will see Virgo with her diamond, Spica, flashing in her hand. You are now facing east; to your left, then, north of Spica, glows great Arcturus, with his attendants shaping the figure of Boötes. Of Arcturus, a star that among a million finds no rival, we shall speak more particularly elsewhere. Farther to the left, beyond Boötes, shines the exquisite “Northern Crown,” Corona Borealis. That too will claim attention in a later chapter. The square of Hercules is just above the horizon below the Crown in the northeast, and to its left, as you face north, is seen the diamond-shaped head of Draco, the “Great Dragon” that Athena was fabled to have entangled with the axis of the world. His stars wind upward between the “Dippers”—the “Little Dipper,” which has the Polestar at the end of its handle, and the “Great Dipper,” which, brim downward, shines east of the meridian, almost as high as the zenith, if you are as far north as 40° or more. The handle of the “Great Dipper” is the tail of Ursa Major, who treads lumberingly about the pole, with his back downward, his head out-thrust west of the meridian, and his feet, marked by three striking pairs of stars, up in the middle of the sky. On the meridian south of Ursa Major stands the “Sickle” of Leo already mentioned. Away round in the northwest, beyond Capella, are Perseus and Cassiopeia, immersed in the Milky Way.

Having fixed the location and general appearance of all these constellations in the mind, you are prepared to study them, and their stars, in more detail. Let us begin in the east. For some occult reason the rising stars always seem more attractive than those that are near setting. In the east, then, the eye is at once drawn to the beautiful Spica, which the impassive, immemorial Virgo wears as her only ornament. It is a fascinating star with its pure white rays, dashed with swift gleams of exquisite color as the atmospheric waves roll over it. There is not another equal to it in the impression of purity which it gives. We may imagine that some dim sense of this immaculate quality in the light of Spica led to the naming of the constellation the “Virgin,” thus called by nearly all peoples, each in its own language: Παρθέυος, Kóρη, Puella, Kauni, She-Sang-Neu, Pucella, Vièrge, Mæden, Jungfrau, Virgine—all, ancient and modern, Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Norman, French, Anglo-Saxon, German, Italian, and English worshipping together at this shrine of ideal purity. If the Assyrians made her the wife of Bel that was hardly a disparagement, for Bel was the sun. So, too, the identification of Virgo with the Greek Persephone, the Roman Ceres, and the Jewish Bethula, all goddesses concerned with the harvest and the fertility of the land, in no way detracted from her virginal character, nor did her association with Astræa, the goddess of justice.

Beside Spica, Virgo has no very bright stars, and it is hardly doubtful that the imaginary purity ascribed to the constellation was derived entirely from the unsullied whiteness of Spica. While gazing at that beautiful star all of these associations, coming from times so remote and peoples so distant, crowd into the mind, increasing the interest with which one regards it. The nations who named it the vernal star, before all others, have gone the way of terrestrial things, but the star remains, as pearly fair as when Aratus sang to it:

“Lo, the Virgin!...
Her favor be upon us!”

Then science comes to carry the thoughts to grander, if less romantic, heights. Spica, it tells us, is a sun which might well claim to be included in Newcomb’s wonderful “XM” class—i. e., stars excelling our sun at least ten thousand times in splendor, for, notwithstanding the brilliance with which it delights us, it is so remote that no certain estimate of its distance can be made, its parallax escaping measurement—what, then, must be the intolerable blaze with which it illumines its immediate neighborhood! But when Science begins her revelations no man can foretell the wonders that she will discover. The spectroscope avers that Spica is speeding hitherward at a pace of more than 32,000 miles per hour! Each night that star is almost 700,000 miles nearer than it was the night before, and yet it is not perceptibly brighter than it was in the days of Homer. Such are the star depths! Such is the measureless playground of the spinning suns! Then Science, inspired by its spectroscopic sibyl, whispers another startling word in our ears: That core of white fire glowing so softly in the vernal midnight has an invisible companion star, with which it circles in an orbit 6,000,000 miles in diameter, and every four days they complete a swing in their mighty waltz!

The star Epsilon (ε) in Virgo (see Chart VII, at the end of the book) is Vindemiatrix, the “Grape-gatherer,” thus named from some imagined association with the vintage. Mukdim-al-Kitaf, “The Forerunner of the Vintage,” the Arabs called it, taking their hint from the Greeks before them. Admiral Smyth, in his Cycle of Celestial Objects, has these curious lines on this star:

“Would you the Star of Bacchus find on noble Virgo’s wing,
A lengthy ray from Hydra’s heart unto Arcturus bring;
Two-thirds along that fancied line direct th’ inquiring eye,
And there the jewel will be seen, south of Cor Caroli.”

The reader may be interested in trying the star-loving admiral’s plan for finding Vindemiatrix.

Gamma (γ) is Porrima, a prophetic goddess of ancient Latium, consulted especially by the women. But for us this star is most interesting as being one of the first binaries discovered in the heavens. It is a charming object for a small telescope. The two components revolve round their common centre of gravity in a period of about one hundred and eighty years.

As the reader progresses in his studies he will find Virgo full of interesting objects, including the celebrated “Field of the Nebulæ,” marked out by the stars Beta (β), Gamma (γ), Delta (δ), Epsilon (ε), and Eta (η); but to see the nebulæ, which are thickly scattered there, he must have a powerful telescope.

Southwest of Virgo, but near the southeastern horizon, the quadrilateral figure of the constellation Corvus, the “Crow,” catches the eye. Its brightest star is of less than the second magnitude, yet by their apparent association the four stars immediately attract attention. One sees no special reason why the figures marked out by these stars should be likened to the form of a bird; but it was a raven to both the Greeks and the Romans, and similarly symbolical to other early peoples. The Arabs, however, at first called it the “Tent,” a designation which at least had a real resemblance for its basis. But these stars possess a charm independent of any fancied likeness to terrestrial things. In looking at them we do not think of the billions of miles which actually separate them from each other, but only of their seeming companionship. If, on the other hand, we force ourselves to consider the immense distances between them the mind is overwhelmed with the reflection that here, plainly staked out before us, is a field of space of absolutely unthinkable magnitude with its angles as clearly marked as if a celestial surveyor had placed corner-stones there. Note that the star Alpha (α), once the leader of the constellation in brightness as well as in alphabetical rank, is now so faint that you have to look for it where it shrinks, in half concealment, below one of its now brighter neighbors. These abasements are not very uncommon among the stars. Their glory, too, is mutable; they also have their ups and downs. The Arabic name for Alpha (α) was Al Chiba, or Al Hiba, meaning the “Tent.” Gamma (γ), now the brightest star of the constellation, was called Gienah, the “Wing,” and Delta (δ), Algorab, or Al Ghurab, the Arabic name for “Raven,” but Beta (β), which is perhaps as bright as Gamma (γ), has no special designation.

From Corvus the eye wanders naturally to its neighbor on the west, Crater, the “Cup.” Both of these constellations rest on the back of the long serpentine Hydra. Crater is far less conspicuous than Corvus; but its resemblance to a cup is rather striking, although the imaginary vessel lies tipped up on its side with the open part toward the east. Among the many ascriptions of this starry cup in ancient mythology to various gods and goddesses, none is more interesting than that which made it the cup of Medea, thus including Crater among the numerous constellations which were associated in the imagination of the Greeks with their great romance of the Argonautic Expedition. Its brightest stars are only of the fourth and fifth magnitudes, and individually not worth much attention.

Hydra, which stretches its immense coils across about seven hours of right ascension, passing under Cancer, Leo, Crater, Corvus, Virgo, and a part of Libra, also carries the mind back through the golden mists of the morning of Greek mythology to the adventures of Jason and his crew of Argonauts, for it was once identified with the Aonian Dragon. It would be interesting to inquire how much of the perennial fascination of this ancient romance may be due to its traditional association with the stars. Look first at the head of Hydra, now well west of the meridian, below the glimmering “Beehive” in Cancer. It is marked by five stars of various magnitudes making an irregular pentagon. Then let the eye follow the line down southeastward until it encounters Cor Hydræ, or Alphard, the latter its Arabic name, meaning the “Solitary One.” It is of the second magnitude and of a reddish color, and the space about it is vacant of conspicuous stars. There is an attraction about these solitary bright stars that is almost mystical, their very loneliness lending interest to the view, as when one watches some distant snow-clad peak gleaming in the rays of sunset after all the lower mountains have sunk into the blue shadows of coming night. Cor Hydræ is the Alpha (α) of its constellation.

Above Hydra, northeast of Cor Hydræ, at the crossing of the ecliptic and the meridian, is the great star Regulus in Leo, the “Lion.” It stands at the lower end of the handle of a very distinctly marked sickle-shaped figure, which includes the breast, head, and mane of the imaginary lion. Regulus is not only a beautiful star, but it possesses much practical importance as one of the principal “nautical stars,” having been employed by sailors ever since the beginning of navigation to determine their place at sea. The sun almost runs over this star about the 20th of August, and every month the moon passes close beside it, and sometimes occults it. Thus it serves as a golden mile-stone in the sky. It has strangely affected the imagination of mankind in all ages. From the remotest times it has everywhere been known as the “royal star” par excellence. In Greek it was βασιλίσκος, in Latin Rex, from which Copernicus constructed our name, Regulus. There are three other “royal stars,” Aldebaran, Antares, and Fomalhaut, but Regulus has always been, in a certain way, their chief. For five thousand years it has been believed, traditionally, to control the affairs of heaven, and the astrologers have seized upon this idea by making it the natal star of kings, and those destined to kingly achievements and rule. In our age of science we may safely indulge these fancies; they can now do no harm, and they add immensely to the interest with which we regard the star that gave birth to them. When the “Royal Star” crosses high on the meridian in the vernal evenings, the imagination is thrown back over almost the whole course of the history of the Aryan race, and the rays of Regulus bring again the dreams of Babylon and Nineveh, of Greece and Rome, of India, and of the star-watching deserts of Arabia. Cyrus, in his conquering marches, may have looked to that star for help and inspiration, for it was the heavenly guardian of the Persian monarchs.

The spectroscope tells us that Regulus, like Spica, is approaching us, but less rapidly, drawing nearer about 475,000 miles per day. But its distance is 950,000,000,000,000 miles (parallax 0″.02), and it outshines the sun one thousand times.

The second star above Regulus, in the curve of the sickle’s blade, is Gamma (γ), or Algieba (Arabic the “Forehead”), a beautiful double, probably binary, with a period of revolution which Doberck has estimated at about four hundred years. The larger star of the pair is golden-orange and the smaller bronze-green, a marvellous contrast, and an ordinary telescope shows well the spectacle, the distance between the components being 3″.78. And this wonderful pair is rushing toward the solar system at the rate of two million miles per day. Yet so great is its distance that we have no record that in a thousand years men have noticed a brightening of the headlight of this terrible locomotive of space! But probably the more refined methods of the present time, if applied for a similar period, would reveal an ominous expansion of that oncoming light. Gamma is interesting as marking, roughly, the spot in the sky which was the apparent centre of radiation for the November meteors, which were last seen in their splendor in 1866-67, their return in 1899-1900, for which the world had long been waiting, having been prevented by the disturbing attraction of Jupiter and Saturn, which shifted their orbit.

The “Sickle” in its entirety is an attractive asterism, and hanging so conspicuously in the sky on a spring evening it may be imaginatively regarded as a harbinger of the opening of the season when the thoughts of men are turning to preparations for future harvests. In the height of the harvest season the “Sickle” sets near sundown, then no longer standing upright, but lying along upon the horizon—a symbol of the wearied husbandman’s approaching hours of rest:

“Nor shall a starry night his hopes betray.”

Away off at the eastern end of the constellation, in the lion’s tail, shines its second star in rank, Denebola (Arabic Al Dhanab, the “Tail”). It too is speeding hitherward, but only half as fast as Gamma. Like Aldebaran, the name Denebola has an indefinite charm, from its full round vowel sounds, and a certain nobility in the look of it as it lies on the printed page. As with many sonorous Indian names in American geography, these old star names lose something of their effect when they are translated. It is better to take them as they stand, transcending terrestrial analogy and definition, like the sublime objects that they designate.

Northeast of Denebola lies the small constellation of Coma Berenices, “Berenice’s Hair,” remarkable for the confused glitter of the small scattered stars of which it consists. It is a constellation with a romantic history which I shall not retell here. It forms an attraction for an opera-glass.

We now return to the region of sky above the head of Hydra, west of the meridian. There the attention is arrested by a glimmering spot, a kind of starry cobweb, which represents the “Beehive” cluster in Cancer. Its classical name is Præsepe, the “Manger.” In Astronomy with the Naked Eye will be found a copy of Galileo’s drawing of the stars of Præsepe as they appeared to him with his newly invented telescope. It is delightful to look at them on a clear night with a large opera-glass or a small telescope. They are an example of that clustering tendency so often seen among the stars, and which reaches its most wonderful manifestations in such assemblages as the famous globular clusters in Hercules and Centaurus, where countless thousands of small stars appear to be so crowded together that in the centre they run up into a perfect blaze. But in Præsepe there is no such apparent crowding, though the stars are so numerous that they resemble a swarm of bees. The probability is that none of the stars in this company is as large as our sun—although we cannot be perfectly sure because we do not know their distance—but they are, nevertheless, true stellar bodies, solar children, which seem playing together, overwatched by larger stars, waiting not far away. Plato, or his disciples, taking the suggestion from older dreamers, regarded Præsepe as a gateway of souls through which descended the spirits that were to animate the bodies of men during their earthly life. There are moods in which one can hardly consider our coldly scientific way of treating such celestial wonders as being essentially superior to the more spiritual ideas and suggestions of the visionaries of antiquity, before man became possessed with the notion that all science is summed up in measurement. Unquestionably we have more “facts,” but have we more inspiration? Are we as near to the stars as were those who knew less about them? Have we yet got the key to unlock the universe? Do many of us comprehend the dictum of one of our own modern sages—“Hitch your wagon to a star”?

Cancer has no conspicuous stars, and it covers but a small space on the sky, yet as a constellation it is as old as any, and it has given us our “Tropic of Cancer,” because in ancient times, before the Precession of the Equinoxes had drifted the zodiacal signs and constellations apart, the place of the Summer Solstice, where the sun is at its northern extreme of declination, was situated in Cancer, though now we find it in Gemini, close to the borders of Taurus.

Westward from Cancer we see the great group of mighty stars and constellations of which Orion is the chief and centre, but Sirius the brightest jewel. They are now declining rapidly toward the horizon, and will be better studied at another season. They include, besides Orion, Gemini, Auriga, Taurus, Canis Major, and Canis Minor, and will be found more favorably situated in the chart devoted to the sky at the Winter Solstice. For the present, then, we turn our eyes to the northern central part of the vernal heavens. There, almost overhead, shines the “Great Bear,” Ursa Major, always recognizable by the remarkable figure of the “Great Dipper,” or, as they prefer to call it in Old England—where brimming dippers of sparkling water lifted dripping from the “old oaken bucket” are not so familiar as in New England—the “Wain,” or the “Plough.” We have already remarked that at this season the Bear has his feet uppermost in the middle of the sky and his back downward toward the pole. The Dipper, too, is now upside down, drained of its last imaginary drop, though its stars may be the more brilliant for that. The figure of the bowl is situated on the flank of the Bear, and its handle represents his impossible tail. Six of its stars are of the second magnitude, and one, at the junction of the bowl and the handle, of the third. Their Greek letters, beginning at the northwestern corner of the bowl, are, Alpha (α), Beta (β), Gamma (γ), Delta (δ), Epsilon (ε), Zeta (ζ), and Eta (η), and their names, in the same order, Dubhe, Merak, Phæd, Megrez, Alioth, Mizar, and Benetnasch.

I once knew a country school-teacher who thought that he had acquired a pretty good knowledge of astronomy when he had learned these names by heart. He certainly knew more of uranography than most people. The names seem to be all of Arabic origin, and at the risk of destroying their charm I will give, from Allen’s Star Names, their probable significations. Dubhe means simply “Bear”; Merak (sometimes Mirak), “Loin”; Phæd (sometimes Phecda or Phad), “Thigh”; Megrez, “Root of the Tail”; Alioth, meaning uncertain, probably something to do with the tail; Mizar (originally Mirak), “Girdle”; and Benetnasch (sometimes Alcaid), “Chief of the Mourners,” from an Arabic phrase having that signification.

The star Megrez, now so much fainter than the others, was once as bright as any of them. It has faded within three hundred years.

Close by Mizar a fairly good eye has no difficulty in seeing a small star which is named Alcor (signification uncertain). The Arabs are said to have called these two stars the “Horse and his Rider,” and to have regarded it as a test of good vision to be able to see them both. It is certainly not a severe test at present. Mizar itself is telescopically double, presenting a beautiful sight in a small telescope, the distance asunder being about 14″. The smaller star is like an emerald in hue, and the color is usually remarked at once by the beginner in telescopic observation. The larger star is one of those strange objects called “spectroscopic binaries”—two suns locked in the embrace of gravitation and spinning round a centre so near to each other that to anything less penetrating than the magic eye of the spectroscope they appear as a single body.

Merak and Dubhe are the celebrated “Pointers,” so called because a line drawn from the former to the latter, and continued toward the pole, passes close to Polaris, the Pole-star, of which we shall presently speak. The distance between these stars is about five degrees, so that they serve as a rough measuring-stick for estimating distances in the sky. Immediately west of the meridian will be seen a curving row of stars which indicate the head of the Bear. Three of his feet, or claws, are represented by as many pairs of stars between the Great Dipper and the Sickle of Leo, one of the pairs being east of the meridian, one west of it, and one nearly upon it. Below the outer end of the handle of the Dipper, in the direction of Denebola, a fairly bright star, Cor Caroli, which English loyalty named for the heart of the unfortunate King Charles I., shines on the collar of one of the “Hunting Dogs,” Canes Venatici, which Boötes is represented as holding in a leash as he chases Ursa Major round the pole. This, too, is a beautiful double, the contrasted colors of whose widely separated stars are finely shown by a small telescope.

Now let the eye run along the curve of the Dipper’s handle, beginning at the bowl, and then, springing on, continue the same curve eastward; it will encounter, at a distance about equal to the whole length of the Dipper, a very great and brilliant star—Arcturus, brighter than Spica and Regulus, and usually, when not very far risen from the horizon, of a distinctly reddish hue. It is the chief star of Boötes, the “Driver,” the “Vociferator,” the “Herdsman,” or the “Bear-watcher,” as it has been variously rendered. We shall have more to say about Boötes in another chapter, but Arcturus is a star so splendid and famous that it cannot be passed in silence the first time the beginner catches sight of it. There is a standing dispute concerning the relative rank in brightness of Arcturus among the leading stars of the northern hemisphere. Its principal rivals are Vega in the Lyre, and Capella in Auriga. But all three differ in color, and that makes it more difficult to decide upon their relative brilliance, since different eyes vary in their sensitiveness to color. The Harvard Photometric Durchmusterung gives Vega the first and Arcturus the third rank among these three; but many eyes recognize rather a pre-eminence of Arcturus. My own impression has usually been that Arcturus looms larger than either Vega or Capella, but that Vega is the most penetratingly brilliant. It is very curious to notice the effect of the colors of these stars. The sharp blue ray in the light of Vega gives it a diamond-like quality which is lacking in Capella, whose light is white with just a suspicion of amber. Arcturus is a very pale topaz when high in the sky, and a ruddy yellow, sometimes flaming red, when near the horizon. It is a thrilling recollection of the writer’s early boyhood that he felt an undefined fear of Arcturus when seen rising ominously red and flashing through the leafless boughs of an apple orchard in the late evenings of February. All the ancients feared Arcturus for its supposed influence in producing storms and bad harvests.

Arcturus is a sun of enormous magnitude, estimated all the way from one to six thousand times as great in luminosity as our sun. It is also travelling with great rapidity, its speed, according to some estimates, amounting to two or three hundred miles per second; but most of this is cross-motion with reference to us, its general direction being toward the south-southwest. If it is travelling three hundred miles per second, it would traverse the space between the sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, in about three thousand years. We shall touch on Arcturus again when dealing with Boötes in the next chapter.

Disregarding for the present the exquisite circlet of Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown,” and the quadrilateral figure in Hercules, seen northeast of Arcturus, we turn to the great dragon, Draco, whose diamond-shaped head may be seen far over in the northeast above sparkling Vega, which is just on the horizon. As a reference to the charts of the circumpolar stars at the end of the book will show, Draco is a remarkably crooked constellation, its line of stars winding round between the “Little Dipper” in Ursa Minor, which has Polaris at the end of its handle, and the “Great Dipper” of Ursa Major. Its most interesting, though not now its brightest, star is Alpha, or Thuban, Arabic for “dragon.” It lies between the end of the handle of the Great Dipper and the bowl of the small one. About forty-six hundred years ago Alpha Draconis was the Pole-star, and is believed to have shone down the long tube-like passage in the great pyramid of Cheops into the watching eyes of the priestly astronomers, assembled to view it in the mysterious chamber hollowed out of the solid rock deep under the foundations of the mighty pile. They thus had a telescope more than three hundred feet long as immovable as the solid earth, but, alas for their calculations, the star itself shifted its position, and their gigantic observing tube became useless until modern science inferred from its position the date of their building. How imposing to the imagination this association between a particular star and the mightiest structure made by human hands on the earth! Two centuries ago Thuban was more than twice as bright as it is now, and when the Egyptian priests sedulously observed it from their gloomy cavern, more than a thousand years before the magic-working[Pg 46] days of Moses, it may have been brighter still.

Gamma (γ), or Eltanin (the “Dragon”), in the triangular head, is now the brightest star in the constellation, and it, too, has a history. Lockyer and others have identified it as the orientation star of Rameses’ great temple at Karnak, and of the temples of Hathor and Mut at Dendera and Thebes. There is something magnificent in this thought of the ancient temple-builders—to square their work by the stars, and to construct long rows of sphinxes and majestic columns to conduct a ray from the sky to the eye of the god in his dark and hidden chamber, where no impious foot dared follow.

When you are tired of tracing the windings of the Dragon, turn to Ursa Minor and Polaris. The “Little Bear,” it has been remarked, has an even more preposterous tail than his greater brother. Polaris is at the end of the tail, or the end of the handle of the Little Dipper, and the bowl of the latter is on the bear’s flank.

If one knows nothing else of uranography, one should at least know Polaris, the “North Star.” To recognize that star is to be able to orient yourself wherever you may be in the northern hemisphere. A whole volume could be written on its connection with human affairs. For at least two thousand years it has been the cynosure of sailors, and of wanderers by land as well. You cannot be lost if you have Polaris to guide you. The magnetic compass varies and misleads, the sun and the moon change their places, all the other stars circle through the heavens, but Polaris is always there, shining over the pole of the earth, the image of steadfastness. Only the slow Precession of the Equinoxes affects it. At the present time it is within one degree and a quarter of the true pole of the heavens, and it is drawing nearer that point, so that in two hundred years it will be less than half a degree from it—less than the apparent diameter of the moon. The little circle that it daily describes in the sky may be disregarded, for it is hardly noticeable except with instruments; but it is easy to fix the star’s position with considerable accuracy by simple observation. Note that the Great Dipper and the “W”-shaped figure in Cassiopeia are on opposite sides of the pole. When one is above, the other is below; when one is on the east, the other is on the west. Draw an imaginary line from the star Mizar in the Great Dipper to the star Delta (δ) in Cassiopeia and it will pass almost directly through the pole. Polaris is on that line, a degree and a quarter from the pole in the direction of Delta Cassiopeiæ. If the observation is made when Delta is above the pole and Mizar below it, Polaris will be on the meridian, or north and south line, a degree and a quarter above the pole; when Delta is west of the pole and Mizar east of it, Polaris will be a degree and a quarter west of the meridian; when Delta is below the pole and Mizar above it, Polaris will be on the meridian a degree and a quarter below the pole; and, finally,[Pg 48] when Delta is east of the pole and Mizar west of it, Polaris will be a degree and a quarter east of the meridian. The intermediate positions you can easily deduce for yourself.

But Polaris will not continue to be the unerring guide to the north that it now is. The Precession of the Equinoxes is carrying the pole progressively westward in right ascension, so that Polaris will eventually be left far behind. But the motion of the pole is in a circle about twenty-three and a half degrees in radius, and it requires about 25,800 years to complete a revolution round this circle. Consequently, at the end of that period, Polaris will have come back to reign again as the North Star for many centuries. In the interim other stars will have occupied its place. About 11,500 years from now the brilliant Vega, or Alpha Lyræ, will be the North Star, and in about 21,000 years Alpha Draconis (Thuban) will once more shine down the great northward-pointing passage in the pyramid of Cheops, if that pyramid shall still exist.

Polaris, unlike some of the others stars that we have been looking at, is running away into space instead of approaching us, at a speed which has been estimated at about 1,380,000 miles per day. Its present distance is not less than 200,000,000,000,000 miles. It has an invisible companion with which it circles in an orbit of a few million miles diameter in a period of about four days.

Polaris is also a celebrated visual double. With a telescope of two or three inches aperture you can see close by its flaming rays a minute blue star, a delicately beautiful sight. In the older days of telescopes, before they had attained the perfection which improvements in glass-making and lens-shaping have rendered possible, this little companion star of Polaris was a universal test of excellence. Its prestige was historical. The amateur owner of a telescope who could see that star clearly felt a joy that he could hardly express. The old makers of object-glasses, by rule of thumb, always tried them on the companion of the Polestar as a standard test for small apertures. The small star is of the ninth magnitude, and situated about 18″.6 from its primary.

The stars Beta (β), or Kochab (the “Star”), and Gamma (γ), in Ursa Minor, are called the Wardens, or Guards, of the Pole. In low northern latitudes, where these stars sweep the horizon at their lower culmination, Shakespeare’s description in Othello would be literally true during a great storm at sea:

“The wind-shak’d surge, with high and monstrous mane,
Seems to cast water on the burning Bear
And quench the guards of th’ ever-fixed pole.”

The constellations Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Perseus, now low in the northwest and north, we leave for description to another chapter.

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This book is part of the public domain. Garrett Putman Serviss (2022). Round the year with the stars. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68391/pg68391-images.html

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